FIRE TO FIELDS is a wild sludge-metal outfit from the city of Novosibirsk in the south-western region of Siberia. It was formed in 2007, and two years later produced a demo with two songs. The four young mates – Stas (voice), Oleg (drums), Dmitry (bass), and Vladimir (guitar) – were not the first Russian band who aimed to combine sociopathic aggression of punkcore with soundness and particularity of doom-metal, but their approach was surprisingly fresh and distinctive. Despite their young age and remoteness from big musical centers, FTF gained a very solid reputation in Russian heavy-underground community and managed to build up a small but devoted army of followers. FTF page at Bandcamp.

FIRE TO FIELDS' full-length debut album, Products captures the band’s compelling ugliness in its most raw state. It features 4 new tracks ranging from seven to twelve minutes, plus 2 re-mastered versions of the band’s very first recordings (one of which is a cover version of “Depress” by Eyehategod). Crushing down-tempo beats and coarse crusty guitar riffs spilling out high-pitched noisy feedback is a perfectly fitting match for frontman’s eternally tortured screams. All songs move at a slow-motion pace showing obvious swampy doom metal influences all over the place. Products is not an overtly catchy album, but there’s something brewing that looks like it might eventually turn into a real challenge (6 tracks – 56 min.). There is a misprint on the back of the CD. Track 5 is "Depress" and Track 6 is "Fire To Fields". We apologize for any confusion.

PRESS CLIPS

"Fire to Fields play Sludge. No doubt about this, but their very own brand of Sludge. Where most US bands drown their sorrow in cheap whiskey and heroin, Russia’s national treasure, vodka - and probably some kind of weird local 'shrooms - seem to produce some strange unexpected effects in one’s music. Who dies in Siberian slush, you may ask… I guess songwriting died in Novosibirsk…" – by Frederic Cerfvol at Doom-metal.com (Belgium) (December 2012).

"The best extreme sludge should be fundamentally unpleasant on the ear, and Fire to Fields are almost entirely amelodic... If the most extreme forms of sludge are going to come from anywhere, why shouldn’t it be a place that drops to -20F and snows all the time? As much as sludge in the US is associated with swamps and humidity, Fire to Fields make it work for the frozen ground of their Trans-Siberian Railway route home as well. Whatever these guys might have planned in terms of future recordings or maybe playing up some of the weirdness that seems to be bubbling under the surface of their tense, blinding extremity, their debut serves to reinforce the notion that no place on this planet is safe from the rigors of riff, and that sometimes the best answer to brutality is brutality itself." – by H.p. Taskmaster at The Obelisk (USA) (January 2013).